My family runs a hotel - the Nant Ddu Lodge - in the Brecon Beacons mountain range of mid-Wales. I go home to the hotel every Christmas, and at some point I always manage to say, "I treat this place just like a hotel" and it always gets a big laugh. Sometimes, famous people stay at the hotel, too. My mother always calls me up when it happens. When John Cole was there recently, my mother phoned me up and said, "Guess what? John Cole is staying here. Oh, and he hasn't heard of you." A few years ago, John Birt came in for lunch. My father approached his table: "Are you John Birt?" he asked.

"Yes," said John Birt.

"I wonder if you can help," said my father. "The TV reception in this area can be all crackly and fuzzy. Can you do anything about this?" I think my father wanted John Birt to get on to the roof and fix the aerial.

"We spoke about all sorts," my father told me on the phone afterwards. "The problems I'm having with my car - he couldn't believe that it's been in the garage six times."

"Oh, and he hasn't heard of you," added my mother, on the extension line.

Recently, my family won the coveted Welsh Hotel of the Year competition. It was a big honour, and they wanted to do something to commemorate the success. So they decided to commission a portrait painter to immortalise the Ronsons.

"We've decided to have a group family portrait commissioned," said my mother on the phone. "A Ronson family portrait to be hung in the bar. Will you be available for a sitting?"

"Certainly," I said. "Who's doing it?"

"He's a brilliant but troubled local artist," she said. "He did the mural for the new Cardiff multiplex. You must have heard of it."

"No," I said.

"Oh, come on," she said. "It's been in all the papers."

It turned out that the artist's particular sub-speciality is painting celebrities in classical renaissance settings - such as Clint Eastwood ascending to heaven surrounded by angels. His ambition is to create the longest painting in the world, nearly a mile long, to be hung alongside the M4 between London and Cardiff. It will depict celebrities such as Julia Roberts, Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise in a kind of Biblical tableau, like Raphael's Martyrdom Of St Matthew. His loving recreations of celebrities set my parents thinking. So many famous people stay at their hotel. What if the Ronson family portrait was extended to include celebrities?

"Listen to this!" said my mother on the phone the next day. "We, the family, will be standing in the grounds of the hotel, surrounded by famous people."

"Which famous people?" I asked. "You mean, the famous people who've stayed in the hotel?"

"Oh no," said my mother. "Any famous people. You have to choose your three famous people by Wednesday. We're working on a tight deadline. Send a Polaroid of yourself to the artist. And come up with three famous people. Living or dead. Comedians, statesmen, actors, anything."

"Let me clarify this in my head," I said.

"There's nothing to clarify," said my mother.

"Don't you think it may come across as a little self-aggrandising?" I asked.

"I'm choosing President Kennedy, Gandhi and Churchill," said my mother.

My father came on to the phone.

"Who are you choosing?" I asked him.

"Gary Player, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus," he said.

"All golfers?" I asked.

"So who are you choosing?" asked my father.

My mind drew a blank. In fact, I began to panic. I imagined, in hundreds of years' time, notable art historians gathered around the painting making sarcastic comments. Paintings are so permanent. I was to be frozen in time for eternity with three celebrities, and now the only question was: which celebrities best represented Jon Ronson's essence?

It was easy for my father. It was as if each of his three golfers portrayed a different subtlety to his personality. There was Arnold Palmer, the kind and thoughtful golfer with a common touch. There was Jack Nicklaus, the fiery, steely golfer who once said, "Nobody ever remembers who finished second at anything." And there was Gary Player, the philosophical golfer, whose 10 commandments for life - as seen on garyplayer.com - include "The fox fears not the man who boasts by night but the man who rises early in the morning."

But who could I choose? I found myself feeling hostile to the whole idea, a hostility that manifested itself in a lazy choice of celebrities.

"I'm going for the Beverley Sisters," I told my mother on the phone. I actually have no interest in girl groups of the 1940s, but I did know that the Beverley Sisters all looked exactly alike, and my choice was designed to be viewed by art historians of the future as an ironic silent protest.

"You can't have the Beverley Sisters," said my mother, knowing me well enough to understand all this in an instant.

"Nobody knows what Randy Newman looks like," she snapped. In the end, we compromised - for all time, it would be Jon Ronson, Ike and Tina Turner, and Boris Yeltsin.

The Ronsons were going to be hobnobbing among the stars. The laws of physics tell us that one needs to be very careful approaching a star. If your trajectory and speed are just right, you'll go into orbit, safe and sound, glowing in the warm, beautiful starlight. If you mess up in any way - the wrong direction, the wrong speed - you'll hurtle into the face of the star and be vaporised; only the star will remain. My parents were involving us in a very dangerous game.

A few days later, my mother called to tell me that the concept had changed slightly. Each Ronson, she said, would no longer just be standing and chatting to the celebrities. We were to be serving them drinks. This was, after all, a hotel. So now I was to be frozen in time in an act of subservience . To Boris Yeltsin.

A few days later, the concept changed yet again. It was back to standing and chatting. But, this time, the Ronsons would be talking and the celebrities would be listening.

"So you'll be be talking," I clarified, "and Kennedy, Gandhi and Churchill will be listening?"

"What's the problem?" said my mother.

"Nothing," I said. "I'm just worried that people may get the wrong idea. You know, that we consider ourselves as good as Kennedy and . . ."

"What are you saying?" said my mother.

"Nothing," I said.

I changed the subject. "What will you be talking to Kennedy, Gandhi and Churchill about?"

"What do you mean, what will I be talking to them about?" said my mother. "Nothing. I'm talking to them about nothing. It's a painting."

"Maybe Dad will be talking to the golfers about the amount of times his car has been in the garage," I suggested.

I sent in my Polaroids and we all waited. Months passed, and my father would telephone the artist from time to time to find out how things were going and when he was likely to be finished. Most often, the artist didn't even pick up, and when he did he was a man of few words, which were spoken gruffly.

"Nearly there," he said.

"Are you pleased with it so far?" asked my father.

"Don't worry," said the artist.

My father began to worry.

The day of the grand unveiling came without warning. The artist just turned up one morning carrying a large canvas covered in a white sheet. He propped it up against the bar. The family gathered around it with a sense of great expectation. Everyone looked at the covered painting and at the artist, trying to scrutinise his facial expression. It was, well, troubled.

The artist said, "I think you ought to know that I'm going through a creative stage that some people find difficult to connect to."

There was a nervous silence.

"What I'm saying," he continued, "is there's a possibility you may not like it."

The Ronsons looked anxiously at one another. Then, with a flourish, the artist whipped off the sheet. "There you go," he said.

For a moment, the Ronsons just stared. My mother whispered, "Oh my God", yelped quietly and stormed out of the room. My brother and his wife followed, as a show of unity, slamming the door behind them.

The artist was left alone with my father. They didn't make eye contact. They just stared at the painting. The famous people had all been painted with tender accuracy. There were a few celebrities - Clint Eastwood, Rowan Atkinson and Jennifer Saunders - whom none of the Ronsons had actually asked for, and many of the celebrities the Ronsons had requested were missing.

But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that, although the celebrities were lovingly depicted, the Ronsons stood among them as human grotesqueries, repulsive caricatures of monsters. My brother looked like Frankenstein. He had a bolt through his neck. It was disturbing and humiliating. My parents looked like hastily sketched recovering drug addicts. I looked like a gawky, spotty adolescent, frozen in a gormless pose. But, unlike the other Ronsons, at least it did look a bit like me.

The painter had spent all those months making the celebrities look beatific, and he'd just whipped off the Ronsons really fast, as though he'd done them the night before, as a hostile afterthought. Plus, the Ronsons were utterly dwarfed by the celebrities - my brother was a small Frankenstein, peeking out behind Clint Eastwood's shoulder.

"Sorry," said the painter, looking at the floor.

"We're not paying for it," said my father.

There was a long silence.

"It's just not, um, realistic enough," said my father, attempting something conciliatory, as if the original idea of serving mint juleps to John F Kennedy and Robert Mitchum was more realistic.

My father ordered the artist to paint the Ronsons out and, after much negotiation, he agreed. He turned my mother into Woody Allen. That's kind of humiliating in itself, that the easiest brush over would render her as Woody Allen. My father is now Jimmy Carter. I like to think the artist chose Jimmy Carter, the famed peacemaker, to replace my dad as a homage to my father's diplomacy - because he was the only Ronson who didn't storm out. My brother was turned into David Rockefeller and his wife was turned into Henry Kissinger, which I interpret as an act of hostility. The only Ronson left in the portrait is, oddly, me (I'm in the shades next to Henry Kissinger). The painting now hangs between the cigarette machine and the coat-stand of the bar in my family's hotel, and it is the cause of much interest among the customers. They crowd around it, trying to guess who everyone is.

"That's Kennedy!" they say. "Look, Jennifer Saunders." Nobody gets David Rockefeller. I have to say, "It's David Rockefeller."

"Ah," they reply, "David Rockefeller."

They stare blankly at the likeness of me, too, for whole minutes at a time, trying to figure out who exactly I am. "I'm famous," I say. "I've been on TV." But they all just squint and shrug.